Enormous spending bill raises serious questions

This $106.5 billion package, the bulk of which will go to underwrite the Iraq war, contains some items that fairly cry out for close scrutiny.

The Senate Wednesday passed the largest emergency spending bill in
history, at $106.5 billion. The president's budget request for Iraq was
cut by $1.9 billion to pay for beefed-up security on the U.S. border.
While the president threatened to veto the bill, which adds $12 billion
to his original request of $95 billion, it passed the Senate by a large
enough margin to make it "veto-proof."

Most of the money - $67.6 billion - will be spent on the war. The
expenditures in Iraq have nearly doubled since the invasion as
equipment worn down by three years of conflict has to be repaired or
replaced.

While U.S. fatalities have declined, dollar costs have increased.
The annual war costs in Iraq are higher, in dollar terms, than the $61
billion a year (in today's dollars) that was spent in Vietnam between
1964 and 1972.

No American can object to spending what needs to be spent to protect
our military, but objections should be raised about profligate spending
on Iraq's reconstruction costs. Last year, the Center for Public
Integrity reported that 150 companies received contracts worth more
than $48 billion for reconstruction work in Iraq. To pull out just one
of many possible examples, a New York firm, REEP Inc., was awarded $45
million last year to help plan for Iraq's elections. The company's task
was to "find bilingual speakers committed to a democratic Iraq."

In World War II, a little-known senator from Missouri conducted a
nationwide investigation into war profiteering. His work attracted the
attention of President Roosevelt, who asked Sen. Harry Truman to be his
running mate in 1944. We need a Harry Truman today. We need someone in
Congress to ask questions about war profiteering and partisan cronyism
in Iraq. How many of the billions spent in no-bid contracts to firms
with obvious political connections have been squandered?

What makes this so outrageous is that seemingly there has been no
limit to the dollars available for such contracts at a time when the
Pentagon was resisting the call to spend $450 per soldier for badly
needed body armor. The no-bid-contract favoritism in Iraq has been
hugely profitable for some firms, but the generosity hasn't been
directed at the troops in the field.